How I Learned About the Vagus Nerve (The Hard Way)

Long before I hosted this conversation with Dr. Elissa Chambers, I had a personal experience that introduced me to the vagus nerve in a way I'll never forget.

In this exclusive subscriber episode, I share the health scare that happened when I was 25, what I learned afterward, and how that experience quietly changed the direction of my life.

Looking back, what felt frightening at the time ultimately led me to discover something that has become one of the greatest gifts to my health and well-being. I didn't realize it then, but it set me on a path that continues to shape who I am today.

If you've ever wondered why I'm so passionate about stress, movement, and nervous system health, this is the story behind it.

Thank you for supporting Wellness After 40. Your subscription helps me continue bringing you evidence-based conversations while creating more personal, behind-the-scenes episodes like this one.

Transcript

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Welcome to your subscriber only content for Wellness After 40 listeners. Thank you so much for being part of this very special community. Today I wanted to talk about a personal story that I had when it came to learning about what the vagus nerve was. If you've been able to listen to the podcast I released with Dr. Chambers on the vagus nerve, we talked a little bit about what it is and what it does. And if you haven't listened to it yet, the vagus nerve is a nerve that connects basically your brain to your body. It starts at the spinal column, runs all the way down into your colon. And it is the nerve that is primarily responsible for the fight or flight response that your body has. It basically alerts your body, or your mind, that is, to make your body move. So I learned about the vagus nerve when I was in my mid-20s. Like most 20-year-olds, I was kind of running on fumes. I was working a nine to five job. I was doing tons of cardio after work. I wasn't necessarily prioritizing sleep. I was trying to, you know, work on nutrition. But, you know, I was 25. So I was doing what a lot of 25-year-olds were doing. Doing lots of things that you probably shouldn't do that that's like totally good for your health. But I digress. So in my early 20s, I started experiencing lots of gut issues, which now as a 43-year-old woman, I'm still dealing with. But I had a lot of digest digestion issues. And my stomach was always cramping and was always hurting. One day I went to work. I was in my office. I worked at an office that was a large room that had partitions. And thankfully, I was the only one in the office that morning because I had a hurt tummy. And my stomach was like cramping. I just wasn't able to feel comfortable. And I remember typing on my desktop and like my stomach was cramping so badly. The next thing I know, I kind of opened my eyes and I had been laying on my keyboard. Didn't really know what happened. I had just passed out. And the last thing I remember was having like a terribly crampy stomach and then waking up on my keyboard. I don't know how long I was out. Again, I was alone in the office, so no one really knew. People started filtering in and could see that I was like ghostly white and I just didn't look like myself. So a colleague was like, Are you okay? What's going on? And I said, I admitted to her, I was like, I passed out. I don't know. I wasn't really doing anything. So told my manager, had my fiance, who is now my husband, at the time pick me up and take me to my doctor. So I go right away to my nurse practitioner. She just gives me a full workup, ask me what was going on beforehand, had I eaten breakfast. No, I hadn't because I was 25 and I was just living off coffee. And she listened to my heart, and my heart sounded irregular to her. She said, I think I may hear something going on. I don't know. I'm going to need to send you off to a specialist. So the next day, I was fortunate to get in with a cardiologist. And they do an EKG and a couple other different types of uh, you know, workups to see like what was going on. And the cardiologist ends up like running the test and then sitting down with me. And I remember him just like looking at me for a minute and he had gone over all of the scenarios, all of the symptoms that I had had, read my chart. I at that time what was like a heavy endocardio. So he was like, You have a great resting heart rate, like everything is looking great on my end. And he asked again, like, what happened? I explained to him what happened. And he said, I think you stimulated your your vague your vagus nerve, and your just body is needs to relax. So this, mind you, is in like the early 2000s. So while we had the internet, we didn't really have the internet like how we have today. There wasn't a lot of information online. So before I left his office, I was like, I well, what do I do? And he said, I don't know. I hear a lot of good things about yoga. Maybe you should go take a yoga class. And this story kind of takes a turn from me learning about the Vegas nerve to how I really kind of found yoga. I mentioned at the time I was doing like cardio kickbox and taebo, which is cardio kickbox. But if you don't know what Taebo is, definitely look it up. You probably do. It was a VHS tape that I watched on repeat and uh was running, um, doing a lot of like the elliptical, the stairmaster at the gym. So I was like hard into cardio. And yoga for me sounded so boring. It sounded so awful. I was like, I don't really care about stretching, I don't care about holding a pose for a long time. Like I just didn't think that that was going to be enough for me. But I thought, okay, well, you know, I'll try it. I'm not really sure else how else to quote unquote chill out. So I went and took a class. And honestly, it was boring. It was super boring. I think I chose like a, you know, an early morning class at my local gym. And it was just like mostly like what I thought it was going to be stretching and holding a posture. And now that I'm older, I actually love that kind of yoga class. I think that it's just so restorative and gentle and wonderful and such a gift to your body. But at the time I was like, ugh, I hated it. And I remember walking out of the class, like at the end, and I ran into a woman who was a little older than me. And she had asked me what I thought of the class, and because she was in there with me. And I was like, oh, you know, I was just being polite. I was like, it's okay. I I just I like to kind of go a little, you know, a little faster to a little bit more. And she said, I get it. I used to work out and think about, well, how fast can I get from point A to point B, as fast as I can? And I thought that that meant that I was successful in my workout. And she said, Yoga changed my mind. Yoga made me feel like the competition actually was, well, how long can I stay in point A? And how much can I avoid getting to point B? Like, how long can I stay here? And that became the new competition for herself. And for me, being an athlete growing up as a kid and being in this really kind of like high-intensity mindset of you know, working out to get my body in its like best physical shape, was it was an actual game changer for me to think about that mental shift? Okay, I'm not trying to get to point B as fast as I can and get this done. The new game, the new competition, the new challenge was I'm going to try to stay in point A as long as I can. And I'll do another podcast episode on how I found yoga a little bit more because that wasn't that was just the start of the story for me for yoga. There's a lot more that I'll share in another subscriber-only episode. But that for me changed my mind. And I went back and I took a class and I said, I'm gonna try to stay in this posture as long as I can stomach it and focus on chilling out. And that was one of the methods that I used to calm my nervous system down. And tandem over the years of working on things that like helped my stomach not hurt, actually also helped calm my nervous system, which is something that Dr. Chambers and I talked about on how calming your nervous system can just help with your overall health. And if you have things that are aggravating your nervous system, that's where you should try to work on eliminating those. Not just because it makes you feel better in general, because you eliminate something that's bothering you, but it also helps your stress response and calms your nervous system so that you can start to actually process the things that are trying to do good work for your body. So that's just a little personal story on how I first learned about the vagus nerve. As the years have gone on, I've learned a lot more about hormone response and stress response and how that plays a role in your overall health in your body. And I would like to do more episodes on that in future podcast episodes. This concludes the subscriber only episode of Wellness After 40. Again, thank you so much for being a part of this very special community. And I can't wait to share more stories with you.